School of Medicine, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

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CSI-Brainwave

CSI:Brainwave project’s full title is “Brainwave control of a wearable robotic arm for rehabilitation and neurophysiological study in Cervical Spine Injury” .

It is a multidisciplinary neurophysiological project, developed by the Lab of Medical Physics and supported by two Neurosurgical Departments. It has been awarded and is funded by the 2013 “Mario Boni” Research Grant by the Cervical Spine Research Society – European Section (CSRS-ES).

2) To develop and validate self-paced neuro-rehabilitation protocols for patients with CSCI.

3) To identify and study the neurophysiological functionality and alteration of cortical activity in acute and chronic CSCI.

The CSI: Brainwave project aims at allowing patients suffering from tetraplegia due to CSCI to perform brainwave modulation, practicing Kinesthetic Motor Imagery (KMI) and offering neurofeedback with the form of control of a 6-degree-of-freedom robotic arm. The robotic arm will be designed to mount on the patient’s plegic arm and allow the patient to directly control it using a BCI module. The project aims at demonstrating the added value of neurofeedback for rehabilitation and/or motor restoration of CSCI patients.

This project started on April 2014 and is designed to run for three years (expected completion early 2017). It is currently approaching completion of the technical phase and is expected to start recruiting patients early in 2015 and it will be registered with ClinicalTrials.gov .

The project makes use of the “MERCURY” robot, which consists of a bimanual, fully digital, 6-degrees-of-freedom robotic arms apparatus, which was developed under CSI:Brainwave to reach version 2.0. The robot was initially constructed and developed by members of the Lab of Medical Physics and earlier (pre v2.0) development and user assessment videos of the robotic arm can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqvhHJxuqIM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B94JrhwuqA . Newer videos and pictures of the robot will be uploaded soon.

Under the auspices of the project, the research group gained permission to translate and validate the Spinal Cord Independence Measure in the greek language to be used for patient evaluation. More relevant evaluation tools are also involved and the research team has asked for official permissions for their translation, as well.

Publications that derive from the work of the CSI:Brainwave research group will be uploaded as they are published and the following list will be updated: